"Spontaneously Idolatrous": A Theological Consideration of Medicine and "Religion"

Joel Shuman, PhD, Professor of Theology, King's College

It is commonplace these days to assume that we know what we are talking about when we talk about religion. We believe that “religion” fairly obviously names a fundamental human impulse, a genus that is manifest through a finite but potentially uncountable number of species which serve, if not common, then analogous purposes, most of which are in some sense therapeutic. This account is typically predicated upon the further assumption that religion is personal, that it has to do primarily with belief, and that it is a matter of what Charles Taylor calls “inwardness,” which may or may not be expressed through individual or social action. None of these assumptions is self-evidently true.

The phenomenon we call “religion,” insofar as it conforms to the description offered above, came into existence fairly recently as an epiphenomenon of particularly modern historical contingencies. The notion that “religion” names a universal and largely inward human impulse emerges in the fifteenth century. This genus and species model of religion, which emphasizes private, inward, belief, becomes important for two closely associated moments in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. First, it carved out a space for belief in a world where traditionally held commitments based on ostensibly revealed truth were subjected to interrogation by increasingly hostile skeptics. Faith and knowledge were thereby segregated. Second, it undermined the comprehensiveness of traditionally held theological commitments and the authority of the communities that birthed and nurtured those commitments, thereby creating the conditions of possibility for the domestication of belief. “Religion” could now be subordinated or harnessed, first in service to the aspired-to sovereignty of the emergent modern nation-state, and eventually to the machinations of analogously ambitious institutions, such as, for example, modern biomedicine. A fair amount of the early literature exploring the salutary effects of religious belief on human health exemplifies this.

Theologically, this is significant for several reasons, one of which I will focus on in this paper. By eliding the difference between “religion” and those great historically-founded traditions that have unhappily come to be called “the religions,” the creation of “religion” as a function of human subjectivity increasingly in the service of untutored desire potentially subverts a primary function of those traditions, which has been to train their memberships to desire—and so to live—well. From the perspective of several of these traditions, the human impulse commonly associated with “religion” is itself part of a deep problem; as the theologian Nicholas Lash has written, as a species humans are “spontaneously idolatrous,” bending our lives toward any number of things, most commonly the gratification of whatever desires we happen to have at a given moment. The traditions we call the religions, he explains, exist to cure us of our idolatries by purifying our desires. In this sense they are genuinely therapeutic, for they form us in ways that make possible the achievement of our true ends, those for which we have been made, and thereby allow us to make good use of institutions like modern biomedicine.